


i make up things i would never say (i say them very quietly)

by theappleppielifestyle



Series: We Will Both Show Up Remarkable [4]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, all the avengers are in this, cisswapped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 16:28:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1948137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theappleppielifestyle/pseuds/theappleppielifestyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stephanie copes with the very real possibility that Antonia might be dead, but refuses to give up hope.</p>
<p>(Or, the get-together fic people keep asking for.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i make up things i would never say (i say them very quietly)

_week one._

Tony opens her eyes to snow.

It melts in her eyelashes, wets her clothes and her skin, but it isn’t cold, and that’s when Tony realizes something’s seriously wrong.

She sits up, trying to muddle through her thoughts- where the hell was she before this, why is it _snowing_ , isn’t it the middle of July, why is the snow that has soaked her clothes not making her want to shiver out of her skin?

“Hello,” she says, and it comes out as a croak. She clears her throat, yells, “HELLO, IS ANYBODY OUT THERE?”

The only answer she gets back is the wind whistling, something else that should make her cold as fuck but only makes her push her hair back out of the way. Why can’t she feel the cold?

_Maybe I’m dead,_ she thinks, with a hard clench in her chest, but she brushes the thought off. If she’s dead, then this has got to be hell and she thinks she’d be able to feel the cold in hell. Or, more appropriately, the searing heat.

She strains to remember where she was before waking up, and after a few seconds, she remembers the morning: she had woken up at ass-o-clock to go and save the city with her team. Briony had yawned the whole way to the Quinjet.

She remembers Claire shoving her shoulder when Tony made a bad joke about her bedhead, Thor laughing uproariously at Claire’s disgruntled expression, remembers Nate smirking in the way that means he wants to laugh but doesn’t want to give Tony the satisfaction.

She smiles a little at the memory of Steph grinning her way through telling them to cut the chatter.

The smile fades, her hair hitting her cheek as the wind gets stronger, as she remembers falling.

 

 

 

Steph yells at four SHIELD agents in fifteen minutes, and they all leave with the shaky sensation that happens when you’ve just been yelled at by a national icon.

After the fourth one leaves, crying a little, Thor looks concernedly down at Steph. “My friend, I assure you that man meant no harm in asking whether Tony had been drinking before the battle. He was merely asking what he had been requested to.”

“Tony doesn’t drink when she knows she might have to fight,” Steph snarls at her, and then reigns herself in when Thor’s eyebrows raise. “Sorry. I just-”

She leans forwards, bracing her elbows on her knees. “I just-”

“You get worked up over Tony,” Nate supplies. “We know, Steph.”

“I’d get worked up if any of you vanished into mid-air,” Steph says, gritting her teeth as the image comes to her again: Tony’s voice trailing off over the comms, the Iron Babe suit wavering before careening downwards. Steph, yelling for someone to catch her, and everyone running or flying at her before Iron Babe blinked out of sight before their eyes.

Gone. Like she was never there, like she wasn’t falling in a three-hundred pound metal suit towards the unforgiving concrete a second before.

“Yeah,” Claire allows, slinging her combat boots up so they’re perched on top of a desk, ignoring it when an agent glares daggers at her. “But you get the _most_ worked up over Tony, Cap. It’s not exactly a secret.”

Steph barely manages to keep herself from aiming a glare at Claire herself- yes, it isn’t a secret, yes, Steph is aware that everyone knows just how deep her feelings for Tony run, but they aren’t supposed to verbalize it, damnit.

“Yes, thank you, Claire,” she says instead of glaring, looking down at her hands. She’s been twisting them together, she hadn’t even noticed she was doing it. It’s something she does when she feels useless, and god, she feels useless as hell right now- Tony is god knows where, getting god knows what done to her, and none of them can do jack about it.

As if her thoughts are broadcasted clearly on her face- and who knows, they might as well be, Steph has it on good authority that she isn’t a dab for hiding her emotions when it comes to Tony- Briony reaches over to squeeze her knee.

“She’ll be fine,” she assures Steph, giving another squeeze before letting go.

Steph nods. “Of course she will be. She always is.”

_She always is_ , Steph repeats to herself when her team falls silent. _Antonia’s always fine, she always comes back okay, she always gets through. She’ll be back and annoying everyone in the nick of time_.

She makes herself believe it, because she’s made herself believe stupider things over the years, and she can’t afford to think anything else. God knows what she’ll become if she does.

 

 

It’s a while- hours, days maybe- before Tony sees something in the distance, something solid and rising up out of the ground rather than flat landscape covered in snow.

She grins when she sees it- _down, but not out, assholes,_ she thinks- and lifts her feet high to walk through the snow. She’s barefoot, she noticed a few miles back, and she still hasn’t shivered once.

The ground underneath the snow is ice that she slips on if she steps too heavily, and every time her palms hit the rough surface of the ice when she falls, she pictures Steph’s sleeping face under the ice.

It’s a normal response, she tells herself- ice, Steph, yadda yadda. They go together like peanut butter and PTSD-inducing jelly.

The snow obscures her vision, so she’s fairly close when she finally recognizes what she’s walking towards. She stops when she realizes, the wind and snow tugging, urging her forwards, and Tony stares up at what definitely isn’t Avengers Mansion.

The mansion looks less like a mansion and more like several houses that have been broken up and then put back together by an inept architect, but Tony recognizes the driveway, the roof, the fountains outside that are frozen over here, the giant _A_ that is impossible to ignore and is maybe the most structurally sound thing in the place.

Tony considers. She isn’t _cold_ , she could stay out here if she wanted- but she’s really wet, dripping with all the snow that has melted into her hair and clothes, and even if she isn’t cold, she hates being wet like this.

She enters the mansion, steps over rubble and slips over the iced-over floor a few times as she makes her way to the homiest part of her home, unsure of what she’ll see there but knowing it’s better than anywhere else.

The glass doors to the workshop are smashed, so she has to be careful as she steps through them- she cuts her foot and hisses reflexively, even when the pain isn’t present and continues not to be.

_Weird_ , Tony thinks, and hobbles over to the couch. She wipes blood off her heel, and then looks around the workshop.

It’s not her workshop, that much is obvious. Tony is by no means a clean freak, but even she wouldn’t let her workshop fall into such disrepair.

The Iron Babe suit is in bits everywhere, strewn across the floor, ridden with dust. Tony goes over to a gauntlet, buffs it with her sleeve so it’s less grimy, until she can see her reflection in it: she doesn’t look good, dripping and tired and confused.

“What the fuck,” she mutters, putting the gauntlet down next to her, metal clanking on metal before she realizes what the other metal is. She smiles when she makes out the shape of Dummy, hunched over and unmoving, obviously powered down.

Her hand moves over his supporting strut, stroking in a way she will forever deny to be loving. “Okay,” she says. “This, I can do.”

She reaches down, powers him up, and then nothing happens. She frowns, pressing harder, and Dummy stays still.

“C’mon,” Tony says, and proceeds to pull him apart, trying to figure out what could possibly be wrong with him. She finds nothing, everything is old and stiff from lack of use, but everything should be working, but it just isn’t.

After an hour, she pushes the last piece back into place and tilts Dummy’s camera up so that if he could see, he’d be looking at her.

“Good boy,” she tells him, and strokes her hand along the metal that could be freezing if she could actually feel the cold.

 

 

 

The room goes silent, and some of them jump when there’s a loud cracking noise.

Steph dully realizes that she just broke the edge of a table off. “What do you mean, her tracker isn’t giving off a signal?”

The poor agent starts stammering, eyes on the shattered wood in Steph’s hands. “Um- they told me to come in here and inform you that we weren’t receiving a signal from Ms. Stark’s tracker, so we are concluding that it has stopped working.”

Steph’s fingers are bleeding, she can feel the blood down her fingers. She probably got a hell of a splinter when she broke the table. “Her tracker _works_. Her tracker works if her heart is beating, her tracker can’t _stop working_.”

“Steph,” Thor says behind her, but Steph is marching up to the agent, who squeaks apologies that Steph couldn’t care less about.

“You go back to your scientists and tell them to try again,” she says, and the agent stammers another apology before bolting, the door listing shut behind him.

Steph watches him go, jaw clenched hard enough to hurt, and she can feel the gazes of her team on her back. She considers turning, going back to them and maybe hearing Claire crack a joke and laughing along with the same fear-ridden laughs as the rest of them.

She almost does it, but then the words beat at her brain again- if Tony’s tracker stopped working, and it’s connected to her heartbeat, that means-

“I’ll pay for the table,” she hears herself say, and then she leaves.

“Steph,” Thor says, and Nate says, “Stephanie,” and Steph walks out of the room and keeps walking until she reaches the gym, where there is something she can punch without getting suspended.

 

 

 

 

_week two._

Tony ends up rifling through the rest of the workshop. There are some bits that she has in the one she has back home- because she doesn’t know where she is, but there is no way she’s home- but there are also bits that she knows for a fact she hasn’t had in years.

For instance, she knows she threw out her very first robot (made at age 6) when she was fourteen and drunk for the first time, and yet here she is, looking down at it.

She dislodges it from where it’s wedged in between a table and a piece of Iron Babe armour, and turns it over in her hands.

“What the hell did you do, anyway,” she asks it fruitlessly, because hey, she isn’t feeling the cold and she’s in a ghost-version of her home, a robot that isn’t supposed to exist talking back to her wouldn’t be the weirdest thing to happen to her today.

Not that she knows if it’s still today- it’s constantly dark here, the snow blotting out the sun and never getting higher on the ground. And time doesn’t feel right, here. It could’ve already been days and Tony wouldn’t have noticed.

She frowns as she pokes at the tiny robot. It’s a tiny metal girl, scarred in the chest, in the same place she is, and she presses her fingers against the upraised metal. “That definitely wasn’t there,” she says, thumb going over the grooves.

The robot did something, Tony knows. It wouldn’t be like her to invent something without a purpose, especially when she was so young- even at that age, she had it drilled into her that she had to be useful or she wasn’t going to be paid attention to.

“What did you do,” she wonders aloud, turning it upside down and over again, and-

On its back, it has two things: a small beetle-sized button, and the name _Gigi_ written on it in crude marker.

“Gigi,” Tony reads, and then grins, holding the robot up. “Gigi! Son of a bitch, I remember you, Gigi. Sort of. Things are kind of fuzzy here.”

She presses the button, knowing that Gigi is definitely supposed to say something, she remembers that much.

But instead of words, Gigi produces static, white noise that continues for however long Tony holds the button.

 

 

 

They get the world’s finest scientists to come in, and they all say the same thing: Tony’s tracker isn’t outputting a signal.

Every time they report back, there’s always that underlining sentence that Steph never lets them vocalize, dismisses them before they can get it out, and then goes to the gym to beat things up, or, once, to the bathroom to have a panic attack.

The coffee pot stays depressingly full. It’s not like the rest of the team doesn’t drink coffee, but none of them drink it like Tony drinks it, like she has to have a hit every hour or two or her reactor will give out.

Steph finds that every time she looks at the coffee pot and finds it full, her stomach twists sickly, and it gets to the point where she averts her eyes so she doesn’t have to see how much is in the pot that Tony isn’t around to drink.

She’s fine, though, really.

And Tony’s fine, because Tony’s always fine.

 

 

 

 

_week three._

It might be her imagination, but Tony thinks she’s getting thinner.

Her skin is taught, her muscles are less muscle-y and more flat, and she’s definitely losing body mass. She feels- less here, like she could reach out her hand and tear right through reality, which she kind of wants to do, because her world has narrowed down to this mansion, the empty halls and the snowy garden and the dusty workshop.

She still doesn’t know how much time it’s been, not that she has much of a sense of it.

Sometimes, she catches sight of shadows, but when she goes over to them, there’s nothing there. She thinks she sees Howard once or twice, but she’s putting that down to being in Crazytown, Ohio.

And it’s not just Howard. Tony starts seeing hardly-there visions of her mother, with the same lines bracketing her mouth that Tony has now, and whenever she sees her, Maria Stark smiles at her daughter, albeit a little sadly.

It’s nice. Tony didn’t get a lot of smiles from her parents when they were up and about.

She sees snatches of Pepper in the halls, sees Rhodey disappearing around corners, sees Claire bending down to get something out of the fridge.

She sees Briony asleep on the couch, Thor in front of the mirror braiding her hair, Nate playing idly with a butter knife at the kitchen table.

She sees Steph everywhere.

Steph drawing on the couch in her workshop like she always does, Steph turning on the TV, Steph watching the snow that never stops, Steph smiling at Tony right before she vanishes.

Once, Tony goes outside and trips, falls face-first into the ice and screams when she sees Steph, just as she imagined her at the start: her eyes are closed, eyelashes delicate on her cheeks, lips barely parted.

Even though she knows it’s not real- knows none of this is real, none of it can be- Tony beats at the ice, claws at it until there’s blood and ice caked under her fingernails, yells Steph’s name, tells her she’ll get her out, that she’ll save her, she promises.

Whenever Tony returns and scrapes the snow back, Steph is in the same spot, frozen and alone, and Tony can never help her no matter how hard she tries.

 

 

They try to have a movie night, but Steph leaves halfway through because Claire asks something about where Tony’s gotten to, and then her face shutters as she remembers.

“It’s fine,” Steph tells her, when Claire apologizes. It’s an apology to the whole team, but they all know Steph is feeling the loss a little more than the others. She makes herself smile, the Captain America one from when she had to kiss babies in front of cameras. “It’s fine, Claire. I’m just- I’m just gonna go, I don’t feel like watching James Bond blow anything up tonight.”

She goes back to her room and takes long, practiced breaths, and curls up on her bed.

 

 

 

 

_week four._

The scientist stop trying to trace Tony’s tracker, and Steph screams at one of them and punches a wall.

She gets suspended, and spends the rest of the night beating up punching bags, sans protection, so by the time she’s finished, her knuckles are scraped red and raw.

Briony makes a face when she sees them, one that smooths out as soon as she catches herself making it, and waves Steph in.

“Oh,” Steph says. “No, it’s fine-”

“Get the hell in here,” Briony says, and she sounds just tired enough that Steph does.

Briony’s hands are as comforting as they always are, all thick fingers and scarred palms, and Steph feels her eyes slip shut as Briony dabs iodine on her knuckles and swabs away the blood, putting bandages over the broken skin.

“It’s a dumb idea to do this, you know.”

“I heal,” Steph says, opening her eyes. “My knuckles will be better by this time tomorrow, you’ll see.”

“I know,” Briony says, giving an eyeroll that makes Steph chuckle.

“You haven’t laughed in a while,” Briony says, doing a good job in looking like she’s concentrating fully on Steph’s hands, and Steph appreciates that she doesn’t name dates, or events. Or people.

“Mm,” Steph says. Her hand flexes minutely in Briony’s careful fingers.

She could’ve kept going, Steph knows. Could’ve kept going until her fingers goddamn broke, and she’d still be fine by next week. She _hates_ that sometimes, that nothing can hurt her anymore. Bucky always said she liked getting punched, and though it isn’t necessarily true, Steph can’t deny there was always something therapeutic in getting the crap beat out of her, and carrying those wounds around for however long.

Briony finishes with the bandages, and squeezes the undamaged part of Steph’s hand. “There, all better.”

“Thanks, Bri.”

“You know the drill,” Briony waves a hand. “Avengers, all there for each other and whatnot. None of us would last otherwise.”

Steph hums in agreement, flexing her hands and imaging going down to the gym and watching blood soak through the bandages.

 

 

 

_week five_.

 

Tony tries to make her suit work, make Dummy work, make Gigi work, tries to make a lightbulb work, but nothing ever happens. She’s doing everything right, she’s got everything lined up and in the right place, but nothing ever moves, or lights up, or says the damn words they were designed to say.

Tony throws Gigi against a wall one day, and she bounces off, unscathed.

“Come ON,” Tony shouts at it. She picks it up, throws it again. “You’re supposed to WORK, I designed you to WORK, you’re not USEFUL if you don’t goddamn WORK, why won’t you goddamn WORK?”

She picks Gigi up, goes to throw her again, and then stops when her thumb catches on the grooves in her chest. Gigi is as atomically correct as a kid could make a robot, but it doesn’t have facial features or a dress, or anything, so it doesn’t look anything like Tony, apart from the scars.

She pushes the button again, and static comes out. Tony lets the button go.

 

 

 

Steph ends up telling a story to a girl who she meets in the street, one who asks if Iron Babe is coming back.

“Once, Iron Babe got kidnapped by these bad guys who wanted her to make things for them. And we found her as fast as we could, and as soon as we got there, I asked one of the bad guys where Tony was. But just as he answered, we all heard an explosion g off, and Hawkeye goes, ‘well, I guess we found her,’ and true enough, Iron Babe comes walking out. And you know what she said?”

The girl is beaming, almost bouncing with excitement at being in a conversation with Captain America. “What’d she say?”

Steph has to pause so she can take a steading breath, trying to keep the pain out of her smile. She remembers how Tony had been swaying, covered in burns and bruises, stumbling over to them before spreading out her arms and grinning.

“She said, ‘Miss me?’”

Then she had fallen over, Steph remembers. Fallen over and Steph had caught her, nodded at the things Tony mumbled into her neck, clutched Tony close and carried her to the medics.

The girl in front of Steph laughs, bouncing for real now, hands covering her mouth. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Steph nods. “She did. You know what that means?”

“Iron Babe’s funny,” the girl giggles, and Steph nods seriously.

“Yes, she is. But it also means that Iron Babe is always fine, no matter the odds. She’s a strong one, and she’s gonna tough it out. No matter how-” Steph stops, the lump in her throat cutting her off. She closes her eyes so she won’t cry like an idiot in public and she berates herself for letting herself get like this. In front of a _child_ , for god’s sake.

“Captain America? Are you okay?”

Steph opens her eyes to see the girl cocking her head at her in concern, and Steph musters up a smile. She can smile for the public, she’s gotten good at this, she can mask emotions as well as the next guy. “I’m fine, thank you very much for asking,” she says, and the girl goes back to beaming. Steph can imagine her going to school the next day and telling everyone that Captain America _thanked_ her.

“Sorry,” Steph says, giving a watery laugh. She raises her hand to her eyes, scrubs there a few times as subtly as she can. “I didn’t get your name, sorry.”

“I’m Alicia!”

“Hi, Alicia,” Steph says. “I’m Stephanie, it’s so nice to meet you.”

“You, too,” Alicia says, and ignores the hand Steph is holding out to throw her arms around Steph’s neck in a hug. Steph is thrown for a second, but hugs back anyway, because if a kid hugs you, you do the same.

Alicia pecks her cheek when she draws back. “Could you please Iron Babe a kiss for me when she gets back?”

Steph laughs at that, a short bark of laughter that is just as watery as the last one, and is suddenly very thankful that they’re in a girl’s bathroom with no other witnesses. “I- yes, I will. I’ll tell her it’s from you.”

If Tony gets back, Steph will give her Alicia’s kiss, and then however many kisses Tony will let her get away with, for the rest of their damn lives. Steph is sure of that. She’s done with being a coward, and she’d take a lifetime of rejection if it meant Tony was here with Steph to reject her.

 

 

 

 

_week six_.

Steph isn’t meant to hear it, she knows this. It was supposed to be an offhand comment to a friend, but Steph walks down the hall at the wrong time and as she reaches the end and is about to enter the kitchen, she hears Nate talking.

“I mean, shit,” Nate says, sounding flat and pissed as hell. “Steph’s already lost one love of her life.”

Steph is sure Nate gets a reply, but she doesn’t hear it.

_Steph’s already lost one love of her life._

_Steph’s already-_

She’s vaguely aware of clenching her hands, hard enough her fingernails dig into her palms and make blood spring to the surface. She thinks of Peggy, of their one kiss, thinks of Tony and their one kiss, wonders if she’s going to have to do this all over again.

_It’s not fair,_ she thinks. It resonates like a siren, building up until it’s all she can think. God, Steph shouldn’t have to go through this _twice_ , goddamnit.

She closes her eyes, tries to repeat the mantra, _Tony’s always fine Tony’s always fine Tony’s ALWAYS FINE_ , but it falls flat and Steph is left shaking with it all. Blood drips onto the hallway floor, and Steph turns and starts walking.

_Steph’s already lost one love of her life_ -

She turns a corner. Heads for Tony’s bedroom instead of hers.

_Steph’s already lost one love of her life_ -

She breaks the doorknob, crushes it in her hand and wants Tony to appear and yell at her for it, but of course she doesn’t, because they can’t locate her tracking device and her tracking device is synched with Tony’s heartbeat, and Tony’s dead and they all know it except Steph hasn’t been acknowledging it and everyone’s been looking at her in pity.

_Steph’s already lost one love of her life_ -

The door closes as best it can with a broken doorknob, and Steph is sobbing by the time she takes the first step into Tony’s room. Her knees go out from underneath her when she reaches the bed, and she kneels against the side of it for a long time, sobbing like she hasn’t since the first few months after waking up from the ice.

“God,” she sobs. She clenches her hands in the blanket, the one that smells like Tony, and yells, “FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, COME _ON_ , FUCKING WHY FUCK _FUCKING WHY, COME ON_ ,” into the blanket and bunches it around her face.

When she’s all cried out and has screamed her throat raw, she gets her legs back underneath her and climbs up onto the bed, gets under the covers and pretends she can feel the leftovers of Tony’s warmth. She presses her fingers to the covers, breathes in the smell of the pillows, tries to leech anything remnant of Tony.

The next night, she takes the same route, and ends up in Tony’s bed.

The next night, she does the same.

No-one says anything, and Steph is grateful.

She crawls into Tony’s bed every night, and sometimes she pretends she’s on a business trip and she’s coming home soon, but usually that’s too painful, so she stops.

 

 

 

_week seven_.

They tell Steph that the tracker’s signal is being blocked by magic, and Steph feels a relief unlike anything she’s felt before: it storms her, consumes her body until she’s awash with it- _of course, of course she’s okay, of course it’s magic, Tony’s fine, she’s always fine, how could I think otherwise._

Stephen Strange stands in front of the Avengers as several SHIELD agents shuffle nervously around him, probably freaked out by how he seems to be floating an inch in the air.

“Antonia Stark is being held by an unknown entity of very old magic,” Strange says, and Steph is pretty sure something is glowing under his cape. “I cannot determine the exact origin, but I have been able to locate where the magic blocking the signal is to an area of the five miles we are now in.”

Five miles. Steph can storm that entire five miles, she can knock down walls and check perimeters and-

“We are in a town in Missouri-”

“Well, fuck,” Claire interrupts. “Tony hates Missouri.”

Strange stares at her until she shrinks in her chair, and then he continues. “I believe the entity is draining Antonia’s life force. By this rate, Antonia should be dead by this week’s end.”

Steph is glad she isn’t holding onto the table this time. “Then lets’ go.”

“As I said, I could not get an exact location,” Strange says. “There is a chance that if we are forced to search the town, it may be too late for your friend.”

Steph takes a deep breath, steels her jaw against the urge that is screaming at her to break out of this place, storm the town and punch out anyone who tries to stop her. “What do you suggest?”

“I suggest we break her blocking spell and learn the exact location of Antonia Stark.”

“And how do we do that?”

Strange turns his gaze to her. “This entity is of old magic, Captain. It draws its magic from life force, emotions, anything strong enough. To find Antonia, we would need someone with a very strong emotional bond with her, a bond strong enough to break through the entity’s barrier.”

It takes Steph approximately three seconds to realize that everyone is looking at her. “What,” she says. “Can’t- it doesn’t have to be me, she’s close with all of you. Briony, you’re her science buddy.”

“I am,” Briony says, with an incline of her head. “But you’re her Stephanie.”

Stephanie swallows at that, looks over at Strange again. “How soon can we try to break the barrier?”

Strange bends his arms at the elbows, and they all watch as he shakes down his sleeves. “I assume you would prefer me to do it as now, Captain.”

“Very much,” Steph nods. “What do I need to do?”

“Just sit,” Strange says, approaching her, his feet actually touching the ground this time. “I will need to access your mind and reach for Antonia with it. Please relax, and think thoughts of her.”

_Those things aren’t compatible_ , Steph thinks, and she supposes the others think the same thing, because she catches them smiling.

Strange places his fingertips on each side of her head.

Steph thinks of Antonia, of her grin, her laugh, the way she leans, how she looks at 3 in the morning after a nightmare, how she always lets cheese drip into her lap when she’s eating nachos, her voice after she’s woken up, the arc reactor in the nighttime.

She thinks of that one incident in a hotel after a hurricane, remembers Tony’s weight on top of her, remembers the kiss that turned into many kisses and then fear that made them suddenly stop and never mention it for a year.

She thinks of Tony’s mouth, the heat of it, the softness of the inside of her cheeks, her tongue, her breasts, her breath in Steph’s mouth, her mouth around Steph’s name-

_Tony_ , Steph thinks, and-

 

 

 

Tony is dying, she knows it, she’s stick-thin and reality keeps flickering and whatever’s happened to her, it’s stopping.

The walls of her workshop don’t stay where they are, and suddenly she’s in the sky, flying a hundred miles an hour, then she’s in her bed after a long night of partying, then she’s on the couch with her team, then she’s on the couch with Obie, and he has his hand inside her chest.

He’s saying things, awful things about wanting her but her not being appealing after Afghanistan, and Tony has nightmares about this often enough, she shouldn’t be made to live it out again.

Obie’s hand _twists_ , and Tony whimpers.

He yanks, and then he’s gone, and Tony’s in the workshop again. When she checks, her arc reactor isn’t there, and her skin doesn’t feel solid under her fingers, nothing does, everything gives a little under her hands.

“Help me,” she croaks, and then yells it. “HELP ME.”

No-one comes, and Tony shouldn’t be surprised at this point.

She’s crawling now, past Dummy who still isn’t moving, his head drooped lifelessly, and Tony crawls until she gets to the workshop table which has Gigi on it, who for some reason has the arc reactor where she used to have a button.

_I’m dying_ , Tony finds herself thinking. _Fuck, I’m dying and I don’t even know where I am, what the fuck._

Her breath comes in sips, and she reaches a hand up to grab at Gigi and the reactor. She doesn’t make it, instead Gigi falls off the workshop table and lands on her button, which is now the reactor.

The button presses inwards, and Gigi’s tinny voice rings out, just as it did when Tony was a child, in the same bullshit chirpy voice that Tony used to find comforting before she realized that people who talked like that usually wanted something from her.

“It’s okay, Antonia,” Gigi chirps. “I’m here! You’re not alone!” Then the tape winds to a stop.

Tony stares, and her laugh catches in her throat. “What the fuck,” she chokes out. “Oh my god, I am the most fucked up-”

She stops to have a coughing fit, curling in on herself, and every time her body shakes the walls of the workshop shimmer and vanish, and by the time she’s managed to stop coughing, she isn’t in the workshop anymore.

Instead she’s in a warehouse, she’s propped up on her knees on the floor and the floor is dirty, everything’s dirty, and there’s a woman standing over her with pitch-dark eyes and pinpricks of light in them.

Tony licks her lips. They’re cracked. “Fuck you.” It comes out weaker than ever.

The woman- or, not a woman, definitely not a woman, there is nothing human about this thing- smiles. “I like you conscious when I get the last of it,” she says, and her voice sounds oddly soothing, like the ocean lapping on a shore. It doesn’t match how her nails are digging into Tony’s neck.

“Fuck-” Tony wheezes in a breath. “You.”

The woman tuts. “So stubborn. I got so much out of you, little one.”

“Fuck you.”

Another smile. “Your mind was a prickly place, I must say.”

“I’m a prickly person,” Tony manages. She’s proud of getting the whole sentence out. Breathing is becoming easier now that the woman is easing up on her windpipe.

A laugh, this time. “No-one is coming to save you, Stark. I made sure they cannot find you.”

“You’d be surprised how stubborn my friends are,” Tony grits.

“No-one is coming,” the woman repeats, her voice ocean-soothing. “No-one ever has before, why would they start now? You’re easily replaced, everyone knows War Machine is second in line to take your place. Your friends will grieve your loss, but they will inevitably move on when a better opportunity presents itself. You are nothing, Antonia. And you are going to die, on your knees, alone.”

Tony absorbs this, breathing through the blood, because apparently something inside her mouth is bleeding. Her cheek, she thinks.

She remembers, distantly, being the girl who made Gigi, who made a robot to tell her she wasn’t alone, and then remembers being alone for a good long while, remembers being certain, down to her bones, that this was how it would always be.

She takes a breath, breathes through the blood, and says, “Y’know, this girl told me once that I was a big woman in a suit of armour. That I was just playing at being a hero.”

The woman parts her lips, but Tony cuts her off. If she’s going to die on her knees, she’s going to get her two cents in first, even if she has to shove them down this monsters’ throat.

“She believed it, too,” Tony nods. “I mean, she was going through some shit at the moment, I sort of provoked her, and there was this whole thing with Loki, so neither of us can really be held to our actions-”

Tony swallows blood. Continues, “Bottom line, she believed it. And so did I, at that point. Deep down, I know I’m always going to believe it, just a little bit. But you know what?” Tony bares her teeth in a vicious grin. “Fuck you. She was wrong. She admitted she was wrong, and she admitted she thinks I’m a hero, and she fucking BELIEVES it. Because this woman- when she believes in something, in someone, she believes in it with everything she’s got. So I’m thinking, hey, I gotta be at least worth something if she thinks that about me, right? I gotta be something, with that much behind me. So fuck you. She believes I’m a hero, and you know what else she believes in? The Avengers. She believes in our team. And me- well, I’m not a team player. Never have been. But this fucking team, these people, they made me think twice about it.”

Tony’s knees hurt, everything hurts, everything aches, but she raises her head and keeps her gaze steady. “You know what I believe,” she gasps, breathing becoming an issue again. “I believe I’m a fucking hero, and I believe in my team, and I believe that they’d rather die than let me rot here. They’re coming to get me. I’m not- I’m not alone.”

And Tony laughs at that, because it’s bizarre, now, to think of that fact. “I don’t have to be alone anymore,” she says, and-

 

 

 

_Tony_ , Steph thinks, and at first there’s nothing, and then:

_Steph?_

 

 

 

“We’ve got a lock!”

“Holy shit, lemme see-”

“Thank god. Thank _god_.”

“It’s less than a mile from here, get Steph awake, let’s go-”

 

 

 

Steph feels her, feels Tony’s mind like she always thought it would be- all galvanized metal and whirling sparks and slick and fastfast _fast_ , all glossy and gritty and dark in some places, dark in a lot of places, oily and greasy parts that Tony hides in, hard knocks and keep going gotta keep going, stubborn stubborn keep grinding through.

In turn, Tony feels Steph’s mind wrap around hers for a moment- the steady rock that breaks at the right touch, the unflinching stare, standing up alwaysalwaysalways, soft and slow and steady, hands that are never used to the strength, protecting and standing high, skinny and reckless and brave throwing headfirst into things, take the hit take the hit punch back.

At the feel of each other’s mind, they can’t stop the massive flow of love from bleeding over, the overwhelming wave of it, like a reflex in reaction to each other that makes them wake up gasping.

 

 

 

Tony sucks in a breath, and the woman’s hands are at her throat again. Her eyes are flashing now, bright enough that Tony squeezes her eyes shut against it.

“What did you DO,” the woman howls, no longer a calming ocean, shaking Tony. “WHAT DID YOU DO, WHAT DID YOU DO-”

“Told you I wasn’t alone,” Tony wheezes, and grins despite the hands tightening around her neck.

 

 

 

Steph drives a van, drives fast enough that Claire is screaming in the backseat, and Steph is laughing and grinning and she skids the van to a stop right in front of the warehouse where Tony is.

They burst in, Hulk roaring and charging at the thing with her hands around Tony’s throat, and the entity goes flying at a knock of Hulk’s fist.

Steph sprints, falls to her knees just as Tony crumples.

“I gotcha,” Steph says, and catches her.

Tony is gasping for breath, Tony is bruised and bloody and skinny and battered and Tony is the best thing Steph has ever seen in her life.

She jerks in Steph’s grasp, gulping air, and Steph strokes her back and holds her close and away from the fight that is going on outside the warehouse now that Hulk tore down a wall.

“I gotcha,” Steph repeats. “It’s okay, I gotcha, I’m here. It’s okay, Antonia. I’m here, you’re not alone.”

Tony laughs at that, a weak, flimsy thing on the verge of tears, and Steph has a moment where she remembers that robot out of the grey of Tony’s mind, Gigi, the small one that Tony threw away, and Steph presses her lips to Tony’s cheek.

“You’re not alone,” she says, and doesn’t let go of Tony until the medics arrive.

 

 

 

They patch Tony up, get food into her through a tube until she’s ready to take it orally, and Steph stays at her side in a tiny plastic chair and is afraid to blink in case Tony’s gone when she opens her eyes.

Tony always smiles at her when she wakes up, and Steph smiles back.

 

 

 

week eight.

 

Tony’s allowed to go home, and Steph isn’t allowed to drive her there because she keeps looking at Tony instead of the road.

Tony goes to the workshop first, because of course she does, and Steph watches as she coos at Dummy and pretends she isn’t, as she sasses JARVIS and coos at Dummy some more.

“Okay,” Tony says after a while. “Definitely bedtime now.”

Steph nods, and it isn’t until Tony gives her a funny look that Steph realizes they’re both standing in front of Tony’s door.

“Oh,” Steph says. “Sorry.”

Tony looks at her. “JARVIS says you slept in my bed while I was gone.”

Damnit. “I- yeah.” Steph scratches the back of her neck. “Yeah, I kinda did. Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

They meet each other’s gaze and don’t break it, and Steph remembers the utterly overwhelming love she had felt, the love Tony feels for her, just as bright and disarming as what Steph feels for Tony, and Steph knows she’s thinking of the same thing.

_I’m done being a coward,_ Steph thinks, and takes a breath. “I missed you.”

It’s not what she meant to say, and she laughs after she says it, an exhausted, tiny thing.

Still, Tony smiles. “I missed you, too.”

Steph nods, and leans in to press a kiss to Tony’s forehead. Tony’s quiet as she does this, and as Steph draws back, Tony’s hands come up to either side of her face.

She pulls Steph down, and Steph goes willingly, her mouth opening under Tony’s, and Steph’s knees go weak. She thought she’d never feel the softness of the inside of Tony’s cheeks, never feel Tony’s hands in her hair, never feel the warmth of Tony’s breath in her mouth, and suddenly Steph isn’t as afraid anymore.

“Stay,” Tony breathes into her mouth, and Steph says, “Always.”

Tony grins as she kicks the door open to her room, pulling Steph in behind her.

**Author's Note:**

> here's my [tumblr](http://theappleppielifestyle.tumblr.com/).


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